Space Conductive / Mathew Emmett

Dr Mathew Emmett is a conceptual architect, artist and composer. He works across constructs of hybrid space; site–responsive installation, data–generated sound and emerging technologies. Among other collaborations and international commissions Emmett works with Eberhard Kranemann (co founder of Kraftwerk), choreographer Adam Benjamin, Perception Lab and Charles Jencks. In June 2016 Emmett performed Sender Receiver using a digitally augmented bullroarer to communicate with This Is Where We Are, a data-driven digital sculpture created by i–DAT at the opening of the new Switch House at Tate Modern. Emmett studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, The Architectural Association, Central St Martins and attended the Karlheinz Stockhausen composition and sound interpretation workshop in 2007.

“Mathew Emmett blurs the edge between the latent histories lying forgotten within spaces and buildings with the pathologies of their inhabitants. He has always sought to explore the physical boundaries of architecture, making it clear that he considers buildings as a pathological prosthesis, reflecting the resonant mental state in the environment itself.

Emmett’s neo-noir architecture is situated within a motif of the military, industrial and abandoned complexes to provide a dystopian setting for the reinterpretation of the Apocalypse as a psychological environment or ‘psychoscape’. Within these settings, alien incursions colonize the host space, much like a hologram, providing a field within which the internal worlds of the mind comes into contention with the exterior dimensions of the building. This yields a third, three-dimensional cumulative interaction that incorporates the nervous stimuli of the occupants within the agency of the site.

The emphasis of these works incorporates the disaffordances of the architectural setting within a phantasmal intermingling between the haunted depths devoid of human occupation with the emotional revenants distributed across individuals and situations. More explicitly, Emmett considers space as psychoactive; affective structures that reflect the psychosis of its past, present and future inhabitants.”